by

Derek Tricolore
(Tricolore)

........angst..........hopelessness...... wandering.............lost....... empty.......cold..... ....... searching....... LO-FI drums! FEED ME MORE MAN!. This has got to be the coolest entry i've heard in rookie division. You are a master of your style man. I dunno, i love depressing, ambient, d&bish, N.O.I.S.E, kinda music. Smooth flowing piece. Samples are appropriate for the style, i'm not gonna take off for the quality of them ( after all, would someone take off points because a CHIP song used CHIP samples? I think not.. hehe ). You use those cluster notes near the end of some patterns, adds to the feeling. Your frantic beats near the middle of the piece come in a bit too abruptly though. But other than that, this is a great smooth flowing piece... oops.. i already said that. This is the kind of song I would listen to on loop over and over while I code, work, or draw. I hope you do real great in round two.

Nice ambient piece. That beat you had toward the end tho... I wish it was going the whole time. Its good music, but it has a bit of trouble keeping my attention.

Wow.. very eirie - even scary! :) Love it. The vocals seem out of place though - you should have pushed it further into the background. Still, i like the ambient style. It's got carefully calculated slow chord development with beat buildup and melody variation. The excessive use of dissonance creates a successful eirie atmosphere (breakbeat/industrial/ambient). It sounds perfect to me, but that may be because I like this genre.

Samples: Good set, with creative sound effects. The drumseq might have been better not built than built then chopped (I could tell it was a seq before I even looked). Effects: Didn't have lots but didn't need lots. A few instruments were defined. Composition: Pretty good for ambient. Sounds like you patterned after "Shapes" by Radix. Some of the electric piano bits needed some more tweaking. Fast part in the middle sticks out too much. Subtlety: Reasonable, given the working set. Noticeable attention to (some) details, but your chopped drumseq causes dead air (e.g. rows 32-40 of orders 4 and 6). You should've spent a channel on just a nice ride cymbal. Good harmonies just before the fast part. Balance: Volumes were nicely adjusted and spectrum was good. Strong points: Soft, lush, addictive. Weak points: Formless, an octave low. Could improve: Try relying less on sound effects to fill out your song.

Well done, slow deep sound, but nice idea with changing speed/mood of song. Good deep samples. This guy knows how to use 14 channels.

This song features very good samples which are well used. The drum loops, which have been cut up and sequenced, are particularly well chosen. The set blends very nicely. The song is quite simple, although effective. Unfortunately it hardly moves about at all, and the song gets pretty repetitive. It does break well into a faster section at one point, but the variation is lacking. It takes a long time to build, but this works well - the problem is that after it has come down again it seems to get very repetitive, like the composer ran out of ideas. More samples, perhaps some live instrument riffs like a trumpet or else some more analogue synth sounds (all processed with the right amount of reverb and echo), would have been a good thing to add variety. What sounded like a bass sample played several octaves above it's normal range was used as a "lead". This sounded reasonably OK, but a good electric piano (rhodes) sample might have been better. The actual riffs it was playing were not great however, and they seem to have been added as an afterthought, or without a thought to playing a good melody. Technically this is good, and a nice smooth sound is achieved, although perhaps this song isn't the biggest test of the composer's technical skills. Overall this is quite average, with below average form, but it is brought up by the good samples. Without them it would lose a huge amount. In this style of music the samples are very important, so it's fortunate you got them more or less right.

m6r-ftfl.it - Follow the Faithless ----------------------------------- Overall: The beginning sounds like a dark ambient song. It is truely synthesizer music with rarely natural sounds / samples. Later with pattern 0x14 the songs turns to a more triphop like sound. Originality: As with all ambient music this one lacks a real highlight. For 5 minutes the song just plays, but the listener is not caught by great melody, rythm or otherwise any part. This is not really bad for this kind of music, but I found it somehow boring to hear the complete 5 minutes. After the 2 minute the listener got the idea and then the music keeps repeating till it fades out. Form: Sample: Most of the samples sound as if the lack higher frequencys. As if they have been samples from an old cassette or if a filter has been applied. Perhaps this was meant to be by the composer. Points: 50

Very strange, rather sombre. Some of the tones are hard to listen to. Overall i liked, but would fix up a bit.

I feel strange listening to your music. I don't know if it's because i don't really like deep/jungle style music or because i don't know how this song came to the second round. Anyway, for me, all is strange in this music (samples, nearly no effect, mood). I said strange but not bad. Someone who makes such song know composing but maybe it's easier to make some mistakes with this kind of style.